Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to portable electronic equipment and more particularly to a multi-function handheld device and a battery-optimized system-on-a-chip used therein.
Description of Related Art
As is known, integrated circuits are used in a wide variety of electronic equipment, including portable, or handheld, devices. Such handheld devices include personal digital assistants (PDA), CD players, MP3 players, DVD players, AM/FM radio, a pager, cellular telephones, computer memory extension (commonly referred to as a thumb drive), etc. Each of these handheld devices includes one or more integrated circuits to provide the functionality of the device. For example, a thumb drive may include an integrated circuit for interfacing with a computer (e.g., personal computer, laptop, server, workstation, etc.) via one of the ports of the computer (e.g., Universal Serial Bus, parallel port, etc.) and at least one other memory integrated circuit (e.g., flash memory). As such, when the thumb drive is coupled to a computer, data can be read from and written to the memory of the thumb drive. Accordingly, a user may store personalized information (e.g., presentations, Internet access account information, etc.) on his/her thumb drive and use any computer to access the information.
As another example, an MP3 player may include multiple integrated circuits to support the storage and playback of digitally formatted audio (i.e., formatted in accordance with the MP3 specification). As is known, one integrated circuit may be used for interfacing with a computer, another integrated circuit for generating a power supply voltage, another for processing the storage and/or playback of the digitally formatted audio data, and still another for rendering the playback of the digitally formatted audio data audible.
Integrated circuits have enabled the creation of a plethora of handheld devices, however, to be “wired” in today's electronic world, a person needs to posses multiple handheld devices. For example, one may own a cellular telephone for cellular telephone service, a PDA for scheduling, address book, etc., one or more thumb drives for extended memory functionality, an MP3 player for storage and/or playback of digitally recorded music, a radio, etc. Thus, even though a single handheld device may be relatively small, carrying multiple handheld devices on one's person can become quite burdensome.
Further, such handheld devices use a battery (or batteries) to supply power to the circuitry of the device. The more power the circuitry consumes, the shorter the battery life (i.e., how long the device can be operated before having to replace or charge the battery). Several techniques have been developed to reduce power consumption of battery-powered circuitry. One technique is to turn off circuitry that is not needed to support the present function and to put the device in a “sleep” mode when the entire device is not in use. Another technique relates to improvements in integrated circuit fabrication, which allow for smaller devices to be developed and to operating at lower voltages, thus consuming less power. For example, 0.18 micron CMOS integrated circuit technology is currently the most popular process, which uses supply voltages of 1.8 volts. Just a few years ago, however, 0.35 micron and 0.50 micron CMOS IC technology were the most popular processes, which used supply voltages of about 3.3 volts. In the near future, 0.10 and 0.13 micron CMOS IC technology will most likely become the technology of choice, which use supply voltages of about 1.0 volts. While these techniques work to reduce power consumption, they are not optimized on a chip-by-chip basis, but are designed based on worst-case operation of the integrated circuit. As such, a majority of the integrated circuit circuits are consuming more power than necessary, since the power reducing techniques are worst-case based and not individually established.
Yet further, many handheld devices include an external memory interface to couple to external memory, such as a memory stick, flash memory, etc. The memory interface typically includes a state machine that is programmed to process the reading to and writing from the external memory in accordance with a standardized memory access protocol. As is known, many external memory devices use a standardized memory access protocol, however, recently some manufacturers have deviating from the standardized memory access protocol. The non-standard external memories offer some advantages over the standardized memories, thus are desirable for use with the handheld devices. However, the memory interface state machine is not capable of processing the memory access requests for non-standard memory. Thus, a handheld device would require multiple state machines to process memory access requests with standard and non-standard memories.
Therefore, a need exists for an integrated circuit that provides multiple functions for handheld devices including flexible external memory interfacing.